“Lockerbie: Grandstanding & Hypocrisy In The Senate”

The Polemicist

by Michael House

LONDON, England—(Weekly Hubris)—8/16/10—It appears that there are elections to the US Senate coming up.

New England senators are working themselves up into a lather over the release of “Lockerbie bomber” Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Apparently, his release by the Scottish authorities was only acceptable if he died within three months of his release. But the treacherous bastard is still alive, 12 months later. Now, the grandstanding senators are trying to link his release with BP’s attempts to penetrate the Libyan oil market. Not a scrap of evidence to support the hypothesis, but that will not stop vote-grubbing senators trying to link the two major villains on the planet today—British Petroleum and al-Megrahi. Happily, their impertinent demands that British politicians appear before their kangaroo-court committee have been rebuffed.

The senators might like to consider the following facts:

Mr. al-Megrahi is almost certainly innocent, and was convicted on the tainted and confused evidence of a Maltese shopkeeper who was paid at least 2 million dollars for his evidence. Dr. Jim Swire, who lost a daughter at Lockerbie and has relentlessly pursued the truth ever since, is convinced al-Megrahi was wrongly convicted.
In September 1989, the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, was offered, in a letter from the US Department of Justice, unlimited money and $10,000. immediately, if he gave evidence. The letter was not disclosed during the trial or the appeal.
Part of the deal for al-Megrahi’s release was for his appeal to be abandoned. This was essential for the Scots, because it was highly likely that his conviction would have been quashed, causing enormous embarrassment to the Scottish judicial system.
The Montreal convention of 1971, created under the UN-linked International Civil Aviation Organization, stated that the suspects in the bombing of flight PA 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, should be tried in Libya. The US used its muscle to orchestrate UN sanctions to force the surrender of the suspects to a British or American court. The result of those sanctions was the death of thousands of Libyans suffering from serious medical conditions who could not be air-lifted abroad. Over 700 Libyans died in ambulances en route to neighbouring countries. It is estimated that 1,135 stillbirths and 514 maternal deaths occurred as a result of shortages of medicines, vaccines and serums. The figures are confirmed in a UN report of 1998. An estimated 16,000 Libyan deaths resulted from the US’s bully-boy tactics. All evidence suggesting that the bombers were Syrians was ignored.
Even if al-Megrahi was guilty, where is the moral distinction between his alleged act and the actions of the USAF in trying to murder Gaddafi in a bombing raid on Tripoli that killed 59 people in 1986, or of the captain of the USS Vincennes, who shot down Iran Air flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children?

Senators in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

In 2003, a government weapons inspector, Dr. David Kelly, was found dead in a wood near his home in Oxfordshire. He had apparently opened an artery in his wrist and ended his own life.

He had been exposed as the mole who told a BBC correspondent that the British government had doctored their intelligence dossier on Iraq to make it “sexier,” including the ludicrous claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could be ready for use within 45 minutes.

Dr. Kelly had told friends that if Iraq were invaded, “I will probably be found dead in the woods.”

An inquest was opened, but was suspended by Lord Falconer, Blair’s stooge head of the judiciary, because a tame judge, Lord Hutton, was to hold an enquiry into the background to the Iraq War. The Hutton report predictably threw buckets of whitewash over the government. The Kelly inquest was never resumed. Never before in the UK has an individual suffered a sudden death in peacetime and not had a full and proper inquest.

Blair’s tame judge, Lord Hutton, secretly ordered all medical and scientific records relating to Dr. Kelly’s death to be suppressed for 70 years.

Hutton’s findings were that “the principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds on his left wrist, which Dr. Kelly had inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body.”

Now, nine leading medical experts, including two former coroners, a professor of intensive care medicine and specialists in forensic medicine have poured cold water on the suicide theory, in a letter to the London Times.

The point they made was this: The severing of the ulnar artery is unlikely to cause death unless there was a blood-clotting deficiency. “Insufficient blood would have been lost to threaten life.” The artery is smaller than the one doctors use to find a pulse, and would retract and stop bleeding quickly.

Friends of Dr. Kelly say he had damaged his right arm and was incapable of cutting steak. He was unlikely to be capable of severing an artery.

Kelly was supposed to have taken 29 painkillers. But he had an aversion to swallowing medicines.

His fingerprints were not found on the knife lying beside his body. Nor were gloves found.

The case of Dr. Kelly has a very bad smell. It needs to be investigated thoroughly be someone who is not a government trusty.

Is there yet another war-crime to lay at Blair’s door?

Who killed David Kelly?